Intending 'queer' community
by Julie A. Wortman

Many people left the Episcopal Church's General Convention this past July feeling that some decent progress had been made in the acceptance of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered (glbt) people into the life of the church. After all, for the first time -- and by an overwhelming majority that included prominent conservative leaders whose anti-gay views have been well publicized over the years -- the General Convention officially recognized that members of the church are living in committed lifelong relationships other than marriages and that these relationships can be characterized by "fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication, and the holy love which enables those in such relationships to see in each other the image of God." The convention also promised that the church would do its best to supply "the prayerful support, encouragement and pastoral care necessary to live faithfully by [these values]."

Thomas Berry, one of today's foremost thinkers on ecology and religion, once said in an interview in Parabola that he is constantly asked about hope. "It's not an easy question to answer, except that there's no existence without hope," he said. "I think constantly of the future of the children, and of the need for all children to go into the future as a single, sacred community. The children of the trees, the children of the birds, the children of the animals, the children of the insects -- all children, including the human children, must go together into the future." His last sentence brought me up short. Of course I knew that trees and birds and animals have children, and that all life is interdependent. But when I hear "children," my mind is conditioned to picture the human variety. And when I hear "community," I think of the bonds between human beings -- which, God knows, are challenge enough to forge and sustain. Yet at some level, doesn't all community require bridging the gap between ourselves and the "other" whom we perceive as different and separate from us? Doesn't it require resisting the conditioning that tells us who belongs and who does not? In this issue we have tried to look at some efforts to build community across difference -- difference in nationality and race, religious denomination, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability. We have highlighted, especially, the frontier that Berry points to -- our need to live in community with the earth -- because we believe what Larry Rasmussen (interviewed in this issue) says: Any community-talk that does not include the whole of creation is obsolete. The natural world is more than a stage for human activity. People and place are bound together intimately. There is no hope for the future if we exclude anyone's children. -- Marianne Arbogast, associate editor

At odds with this promise was the convention's rejection of a proposal to develop possible rites (to be tucked away in the Book of Occasional Services) for signifying the holiness of such relationships. Such a move, opponents were able to successfully argue, would be just plain too much for the good folks back home. Still, many proponents of the full inclusion of glbt people in the life of the church felt we had moved one step closer to our goal. It is, they said, only a matter of time.

So why did I leave Denver feeling so disheartened? The WOW2000 (Witness Our Welcome 2000) gathering held in DeKalb, Ill. a few weeks later offered a chance to think through much of the answer. The event attracted about a thousand people committed to the ecumenical "Welcoming Church" movement aimed at making Christian churches "inclusive" communities -- that is, communities not just grudgingly tolerant of, but positively glad for, their glbt members.

Asked to define "inclusive community" during the conference's opening session, Roman Catholic feminist theologian and ethicist (and new Witness contributing editor) Mary Hunt observed, "It seems odd to speak of the Christian idea of 'inclusivity' because my understanding is that the norms of Christianity are love and justice, norms which are expressed in the Christian practice of sacrament and solidarity -- everyone is welcome!"

The next morning another feminist theologian, the Episcopal Church's own Carter Heyward, underscored Hunt's remarks.

"A just world," she said in a wry play on words, "is one of the queerest things in this world. Our struggle for gender and sexual justice is something much more than a struggle to be accepted to participate in the unjust structures of this world. To be 'queer' is to refuse to collude with any injustice."

Although the WOW2000 audience enthusiastically embraced both Hunt's and Heyward's messages as expressing the very heart of the Welcoming Church movement's mission, any sense of self-congratulation was quickly dispelled when a number of black participants protested both the gathering's racial tokenism (a very diverse slate of speakers, but the all-too-typical situation of the otherwise sparse presence of persons of color) and some participants' apparent obliviousness to the workings of white privilege.

"I don't mind rejection when I see it coming," pointed out the young black woman who bravely took the lead in calling the group to accountability, "but I am hurt by it when it comes in a gathering where we say all of me is welcome all the time." As Urvashi Vaid of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute stressed in a panel presentation that immediately followed, "We need an 'intersectional politics,' because we are not single-identity people."

The incident highlighted a basic requirement of making good on an intention to be inclusive that author and Episcopal priest Eric Law rehearsed at the beginning of the conference. "Inclusive community," he said, "engages in the practice of extending its boundaries when challenged that it is not inclusive."

The biggest stumbling blocks to such a radical widening of the circle in the church, needless to say, is the widely worshipped idol of church unity and the political impulses which use this abstraction to justify an anything-but-queer status quo.

At the WOW2000 conference banquet Michael Kinnamon gave his own personal experience of how this phenomenon works. An ordained Disciples of Christ clergy person and prominent ecumenist, Kinnamon was in 1991 nominated for the position of General Minister and President of his denomination. He and his wife had previously made a modest, not very public, commitment to glbt concerns by joining GLAD (Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples), an affiliation which was included in the General Minister nominee profile that was circulated during the election process. Very quickly he was branded the "pro-gay" candidate and the election turned controversial, with Kinnamon at the restless center. (One angry man wrote him repeatedly, ending each letter with, "News of your death or resignation will be welcome.")

"At the beginning of the nomination," Kinnamon told us, "I still thought in political terms: 'How can I keep from offending all parts of the church?' That was soon no longer possible, and thus I was freed to approach the months leading up to [the election] theologically: 'How can I best proclaim the good news of God's amazing love?' The question was no longer, 'Do they like me?' but, 'Am I faithful to my understanding of the Gospel?'"

That understanding received rigorous testing during the election process. At one pre-election meet-the-candidates gathering, a Disciples minister ended a question with a qualifying afterthought, "After all, these homosexuals are just worthless scum."

"What haunted me throughout those months," Kinnamon recalled, "is that I was in the position of leadership and I did not denounce him.

"Why? I tried to to tell myself that I was just caught off guard, but the truth cuts deeper. My life's work as an ecumenist centers on reconciliation, on the attempt to hold community together, on the insistence that diverse voices be heard. But that night I realized there is something fundamentally impoverished about an understanding of reconciliation that left me unprepared to respond immediately and forcefully to this man."

Taking his cue from Paul's ability to live with enormous diversity because every member of the body is equally an undeserving recipient of God's grace, Kinnamon said it finally became clear to him that "one cannot stand above the fray in the name of a reconciling vision.

"I learned that, while we are, in Paul's words, 'ambassadors of reconciliation,' we can speak that word too easily and too early. I learned that unity, if it is of God, is inseparable from justice. I learned that we must be willing to risk -- to disrupt -- our partial, temporary unities for the sake of God's inclusive oneness. I learned that in a dangerously narrow world we dare not be caught off guard. I learned that the church, by its very nature, must be an aggressive counter-culture to every society bent on exclusion."

As I headed home from DeKalb, I realized my own deep disappointment -- and, yes, anger -- over the General Convention's decision to continue tolerating the exclusion of glbt people from the rites of the church was rooted in the simple Christian conviction that some things, queerly enough, are categorical. Quite bluntly, it is not okay to draw the circle more narrowly than creation's reality. And if the folks back home don't understand this, it is evidence of our church leadership's failure to make the concept clear.

Everything we know of God's reality is that it involves more, not less, than we believe. The sanctity of marriage isn't in dispute here. But there is sanctity in other relationships, too. And, most importantly, the historic privilege of some is never an acceptable reason to deny the dignity of those long denied it.

The fact is, politics, not theology, is driving the church's decision-making. And, quite frankly, although I can't claim any virtue in this regard, I am weary of it. As Michael Kinnamon reflected of his "worthless scum" experience, "Though everything in my guts doesn't want to, I must recognize this man as my brother in Christ. But this relatedness is precisely the point. For his sake and the church's, my response should have been, 'Brother, sit down! Such talk has nothing to do with the good news we proclaim. Such talk has no place in a community of those who know that they are redeemed only by grace.'"

What a queer place the church would be if we cared for each other enough to risk rejection in this way. Our willingness to do so, I believe, has everything to do with the sort of community we intend. l

Julie A. Wortman is Witness editor/publisher.